Anime Review: A Certain Magical Index

The Short Version:

A completely luckless loser with the ability to cancel out supernatural phenomenon keeps getting worse and worse luck.  It all starts when he finds a nun named Index laying on the balcony of his dorm, and gets worse when he discovers that sorcerers are trying to kill her.

A Certain Magical Index is an animated action-comedy TV series from Japan.  It is based on a series of light novels by the same name.  The show itself takes place in a fantastical version of modern-day earth, where Japan, especially the fictitious Academy City where the show takes place, is the center for research into psychic powers, referred to as ESP.  Meanwhile, the Church of England is the center for research into magical arts, despite the real-life Bible outright forbidding sorcery and magic.  Just go along with it; they don't mean any offense.

Our hero is the extraordinarily unextraordinary Toma Kamijo, whose only special ability is the ability to cancel out other special abilities.  This makes him a complete failure at school, as mandatory testing for ESP powers always gives him a score of zero, no matter how many remedial classes they make him take, or how painfully obvious it is that his power is easily the strongest in the entire city.  His only other traits are his strong desire for justice - which usually results in him getting his butt kicked, and having an outstanding ability to bluff - even after having one of his arms gruesomely cut off.

The story starts out with Toma running like hell from a street gang, after trying to help a girl who was being harassed by one of the members.  He ends up getting saved by the girl he tried to help, who turns out to be an extremely powerful ESPer.  Mikoto Misaka, or Railgun, specializes in generating and manipulating electricity, specifically to fire projectiles at extremely high velocities, hence her nickname. Against all common sense, he picks a fight with her, and survives.

The next morning, he wakes up in his apartment to discover an unconscious nun hanging over the railing of his balcony, who's also hungry enough to try to bite Toma's arm off.  This nun is named Index, and is the titular Certain Magical Index this show is about.  It turns out that she's being relentlessly pursued by sorcerers who want her dead because of the 103,000 grimoires she has memorized, and she just happened to end up at Toma's place so she asks for his help.  He's extremely skeptical of the whole thing, and remains so until he returns home after classes to find her bleeding to death on the ground, with a self-proclaimed sorcerer taking the credit.

All of that is the first episode.  The story appears fairly simple, but in reality has its fair share of twists and turns.  The next five episodes alone have an extremely well-thought-out and executed plotline.  If you're already interested in watching the show, then consider this a Spoiler Alert until the text returns back to normal.

The sorcerers who attacked Index are actually on her side.  Basically, the knowledge of the 103,000 grimoires she has memorized greatly limits how long she can go without having her memory routinely wiped every year, which the sorcerers have no choice but to do.  Somewhere along the way Index started to see them as assassins trying to kill her, which is right in a sense, expect that they're really on the same side and hate doing what they have to do to her.  This doesn't at all sit right with Toma, so he resists them, at least until Index becomes seriously ill.  With that, he has no choice but to hand her over, but he isn't giving up yet.  After doing research on how the mind works, he discovers that even with her photographic memory and all those books memorized, there's no way Index's mind could ever become full, meaning that there's another reason Index fell ill, and another reason the sorcerers have to dump her memories.  Most likely, it's a spell meant to ensure that Index is always loyal to the Church, and that she won't fall into the wrong hands, and the sorcerers themselves weren't let in on this at all.  He attempts to use his ability to cancel it out, but all he succeeds in doing is activating a trap which causes Index to mindlessly attack him with spells, something the Church claims she should be unable to do.  Eventually he succeeds in nullifying the spell, but at great cost; a final attack spell sent by Index hits Toma square on the head, bypassing his ability causing severe brain damage.  Thanks to the highly sophisticated medical technology at Academy city, he was able to make a complete recovery...at least as far as everybody else is concerned.  Just between him and the doctor, every last one of his memories were destroyed, and there's no hope of ever recovering them.  Index is none the wiser, and demands that Toma continue to be her guardian after he heroically saved her life from the sorcerers, who she still doesn't know are on her side.  Toma is now stuck guarding her just so that he can hide the truth, and is now forced to bluff his way through the rest of his life just to hide what happened to him.

That is one long paragraph, and this is the END OF THE SPOILER ALERT.  That's also just the first six episodes of 24.  The plot itself continues to have intelligent twists and turns, and Toma's loss of memory [oops, forgot to mark this one] comes back to bite him big time when he has to meet his family and doesn't remember a thing about them.  Still, the process of Toma rediscovering everyone he knows while covering it up and solving his struggles not by simply using his fists, but by using his fists with intelligence, makes the show an absolute blast to watch.  Add to it plenty of comedic elements, and you have a recipe for an fun and surprisingly smart adventure.

By no means is A Certain Magical Index without its flaws, but those flaws are relatively minor.  They hold the show back from becoming one of my favorites, but it's still a very enjoyable experience with its unique take on an overused plot element.  I officially recommend this to anyone who can put up with bloody violence and foul language.  In terms of a family-friendliness rating, I give this a upper teens rating, younger with parental approval, and like most Anime, NOT FOR YOUNG CHILDREN.

A Certain Magical Index is licensed by FUNimation in the United States and can be found streaming on Hulu.  All episodes are available for free in Japanese with English subtitles, and as of writing this review the first four episodes are also available with an English-language dub.  Horribly-overpriced DVDs are also available, but if you're like me you'd rather put up with short commercial breaks every episode than spend $100 to get both parts of the series on DVD.